Should a new bird dog specialize in one lead type or bring investors whatever turns up

I'm nine weeks into this and I went wide because I didn't know anything else to do. What I've learned is that wide is exhausting in a way nobody warns you about. Every source has its own quirks, one county wants you in person, another has a portal that times out, a third publishes on paper. I spent most of my time learning systems instead of looking at houses. So I'd vote for the third option on your poll, but I'd shrink the window. Three months of wide was more than I needed to see which two sources were even reachable.

Warrant, what makes an investor answer a bird dog's call a second time is consistency of shape rather than volume. When the leads are always small older houses in the same three zip codes with an owner who has already said something on the phone, a buyer can price his response in thirty seconds. A mixed bag turns every lead into a fresh evaluation, and those senders get deprioritized. Still, rigging is right that the lane cannot be picked in advance. The usual answer is to go wide and write it down properly. Source, date, what happened, whether a buyer would have paid. Six or eight weeks of that and the lane picks itself. Then narrow hard and tell the investors what you are narrowing to, because the announcement is half the value.

The poll splits on a question that has a measurable answer, so treat it that way rather than as a preference.

A lead channel has three properties you can measure with a spreadsheet and no capital. How many raw records it produces per unit of your time. What fraction of those records reach a conversation. What fraction of conversations an investor accepts. Multiply those and you get accepted leads per hour of work. That is the number the scope decision depends on, and you cannot know it for a channel you have not run.

So the sequencing argument favors going wide first, with a hard cap on how wide. Two or three channels, not seven. Running seven means each one gets too few attempts to distinguish a bad channel from a bad week. Two channels for six weeks gives you a rough comparison, and the comparison is usually not close. Sourcing quality varies enormously by county because access to the underlying records varies by state, and a channel that works well in one market can be unavailable in the next one over.

Where quarry is right is on the selling side. An investor pays for predictability, and predictability comes from repetition in one shape. That argues for narrowing once you have evidence, not for staying wide permanently.

The assumption this rests on is that your time cost is roughly constant across channels. If one channel requires driving and another is desk work, weight the hours by what else you'd do with them. Bird dogging carries no capital requirement, so time is the entire input, and mispricing your own hours is the most common error at this stage.

Channel choice turns on more than yield. It also turns on whether the work is something an operator will still be doing in month five. Run a records-based channel and a driving channel side by side for about a month each and the records one often shows the better numbers on paper while being the one people stop doing. The driving channel produces less per hour and gets continued, which means it produces more by the end. That probably sounds soft next to rena-expert's accepted-leads-per-hour, but the abandonment rate is part of the math. A channel you quit has a yield of zero.

The third option holds up best. Kestrel's point about abandonment is the one that decides it, because a plan that stops running is worse than a smaller plan that keeps running.

I buy land and hold it, and the bird dogs who reach me are almost never useful, because they're all set up for houses. The one who has been useful for two years does one thing, which is watch for parcels where the tax situation looks like someone stopped caring. He doesn't send me anything else. I don't think he could send me anything else.

That's the case for narrow that nobody has made yet. Narrow doesn't just make you easier to buy from, it puts you in front of a buyer nobody else is talking to. Everyone wide ends up competing for the same house flippers. Warrant, if you go wide first, at least point one of your channels at something the crowd isn't looking at.

Consider a bird dog running four sources over about ten weeks with everything logged. Two of the sources produce nothing worth paying for across roughly 180 records. One produces 9 leads worth reviewing and 2 worth paying on. The fourth produces 3 leads, and both paid ones come from a single afternoon of talking to a contractor, which is not repeatable and should not really count as a channel at all. So that test comes back with one real answer out of four attempts, and the answer looks obvious once it lands. What is worth flagging is that ten weeks and 180 records is thin. A dead channel could just as easily be an unlucky channel, killing something workable. The two-channel version with more attempts on each channel is the stronger design, and aiming one of those channels somewhere unfashionable is worth the extra look.